If Sunderland are the laughing stock of English football this morning, then those running the relegation- haunted club have only themselves to blame.

Howard Wilkinson was the manager nobody on Wearside ever really wanted. He was the former coach reintroduced to front-line management after six years in the wilderness.

And he was the arrogant, often aloof, individual who did little to endear himself to those loyal followers of a once-proud club lurching from one embarrassing crisis to the next.

Yet Bob Murray, in his wisdom, chose to entrust Sunderland's very survival to this unpopular and often unfathomable figure who did nothing to suggest he could succeed where Peter Reid failed.

From day one, Wilkinson assured those who flocked to the Stadium of Light that he would salvage the Wearsiders' top-flight status despite no improvement in performances or results.

Even last month he insisted the Black Cats were not, after all, locked in a desperate fight for survival and were, in his mind, already safe. For many fans that ridiculous notion was the straw which broke the camel's back.

Wilkinson's long-winded warblings at Press conferences frequently baffled and rarely made sense - and his team selections were frankly no better.

But what could Murray really expect from a dinosaur of the old school with such a lack of tactical innovation?

For a club struggling to control a spiralling debt in excess of #25m, the appointment of Wilkinson and his inexperienced No 2 Steve Cotterill was the managerial gamble plc chairman Hugh Roberts could have done without.

It remains to be seen just how costly a blunder Murray's latest decision will prove to be, but the long-serving chair- man's reputation cannot take many further blows before his own position becomes untenable.

Roberts must survey the wreckage of his sinking company and wonder where it all went wrong.

Wilkinson is a start, but there is a much deeper tale of mismanagement, a lack of investment and a failure to recognise what the club's fans want. There is no doubting the magnificence of the ground-breaking Academy of Light. But what use will the club's state-of-the-art facility be when the new man at the Black Cats' helm takes over a First Division-bound squad crippled by debt, a lack of self-belief and nationwide derision?

Buying players, rather than property, would surely have served the Wearsiders best. Sunderland are going nowhere but down. So what must the man charged with grooming the club's stars of the future feel about the comical state his current employers now find themselves in?

Within eight days Kees Zwamborn has left behind a cosy position training future Dutch masters at the world-famous Ajax Academy for a post picking up the pieces at a club spiralling into farcical oblivion.

Which aspiring young professional will choose Sunderland now?

Wilkinson, meanwhile, has reaped all that he sowed and in years to come Wearsiders will recoil at the sheer embarrassment of his reign.

He will not be missed - the 49 points he failed to win as Sunderland manager most certainly will.